Uncertainty prevails over the facility of free dialysis for the poor patients at Nephro-dialysis centre located at Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Hospital (Coronation) in state capital as the health department has not renewed the contract of the Apollo clinic for about four months now.
The centre was handed over to the Apollo hospitals to provide better nephro care facilities in Uttarakhand on August 2010 under Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode. The five year contract expired on August 06, 2015, after that the department extended the contract for one more year in four phases. However from September this year the centre is running without any contract and in absence of payments, the timed out private partner can stop providing the facility of dialysis any time.
The centre has thirteen dialysis machines and more than one thousand patients avail their benefit per month. After the end of the contract on August 31 2016, the centre has done dialysis of 3945 patients in last five months. In absence of the contract the centre is not able to even raise the bills of the patients served by it.
The success of centre can be gauged from the fact that only 118 dialyses were done in the first month of its operation in the year 2010 and this figure has now crossed the mark of one thousand. The centre has done 12418 dialyses in one year from April 2015 to March 2016 out of which 8722 patients belonged to Below Poverty line (BPl).
It is learnt that the private partner has told the department to clear the uncertainty over the contract and release its pending payment. “We are continuing to do the dialyses of patients on good faith. We have requested the department to clear the situation,’’ said one of an employee of Apollo. The department pays a sum of Rs 936 for every dialysis done of the BPl patients.
The Chief Medical Superintendent (CMS) of the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Hospital, Dr l C Punetha told The Pioneer that the facility of dialysis is going on uninterruptedly though the contract has expired. He said that the hospital has informed the higher authorities about the issue.
When contacted the Director General (DG) health services Dr Kusum Nariyal told The Pioneer that the department had floated tenders for finding a private player for managing the centre under PPP but the process got stuck up in legal issues.
It is learnt that the ‘Nephroplus hospital’ was the lowest bidder in the process but one of the bidders went to the court prompting the process to get stalled.